Top 2014 trends a sensory buffet

At Harney Sushi in San Diego, edible QR codes bring a new element of transparency to dinner.

Photograph by: Harney Sushi
, canada.com

Taking a cue from children’s culture, 2014 is looking to be a sensory buffet, with industry insiders from the food, retail, business, tech, marketing and design sectors all forecasting a year of tactile brand experiences, instant gratification, stripped-down communication and, of course, pretty, pretty pictures.

Experts share their predictions for what’s to come in the year ahead for brands and consumers.

Trend: Visual literacy

From Pinterest to Instagram, Gastropost and other image-based services, more Canadians are letting pictures do the talking. According to JWT, a leading marketing-communications firm, this phenomenon will profoundly change how companies communicate in 2014.

“We’re developing this new visual vocabulary made up of photos, emojis, video snippets and other imagery that’s largely supplanting text,” said Ann Mack, director of trendspotting. “Brands will have to start thinking about all their assets and how they can translate them for the visual age.”

B.C.-based winery The Vibrant Vine, for example, uses psychedelic shrink-wrapped bottles with no written tasting notes or detail. And labels for Motif Wine — billed as “wine with few words” — similarly replace traditional text descriptions with graphics representing each varietal.

Trend: Bold food flavours

According to industry researcher Technomic, eight of 10 Canadian consumers under 45 order ethnic foods away from home at least monthly. The NPD Group similarly finds 72 per cent of Canadians consider themselves “adventurous eaters.”

Add that to a population makeup that now includes nearly seven million immigrants, and experts say it only makes sense that more multicultural menus are in the works.

“The demand is for stronger, bolder flavours and ethnic influences,” said Robert Carter, NPD’s executive director of food service. “We expect noodle dishes, soups, rice, Asian sauces and even fish are going to be popular on menus in 2014.”

Trend: Succinct storytelling

iStock’s 2014 forecast, featuring insights from design experts, portends a rise in five to seven-second stories — think Vine and Tout clips, animated GIFs and so on — in place of long social media videos.

Ford appears to be gazing into that same crystal ball with the automaker’s resident futurist Sheryl Connelly saying: “Cross immediate gratification with attention deficit and we get an escalating appetite for ‘micro-moments’ — bite-sized chunks of information, education and entertainment — rendering downtime a thing of the past.”

Trend: Mobile dominance

A recent survey for Kijiji found fully one-quarter of Canadians would rather spend time fighting for parking than be without a smartphone over the holidays. And industry-watcher IDC reports that one in five Canadians is now interested in paying for products and services with their mobile device.

“People talk about the mobile being the second screen but it’s now, in fact, the primary screen,” said J. Walter Thompson’s Mack, though she hastened to add that the trend will inspire pushback.

“We’ll see a heightening of people wanting to log off — at least temporarily,” she said. “We’re expecting a heads-up movement, where people become more aware of how much time they spend in meetings, on the street, during family time, with their heads down, immersed in their mobile devices.”

Trend: Food system transparency

Restaurant traffic is expected to remain flat in 2014, according to NPD’s outlook. That means if operators want to grow, Carter said they’ll need to steal share from competitors on top of retaining the customers they already have.

To do this, food-service providers are expected to appeal to Canadians’ desire for transparency around such issues as pesticide use, food origins, nutrition value, sustainability and wellness benefits, all of which will be communicated via traditional and digital channels.

This year in San Diego, for example, Harney Sushi introduced edible QR codes that allow diners to scan their sushi to learn more about the state of a species’ global stock and where their fish was caught.

Trend: Immersive retail

Brick-and-mortar is going experiential, from Burberry’s digitally integrated flagship store — designed to mimic the feeling of online shopping — to New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Rain Room exhibit, for which visitors queued for hours this year to feel as if they controlled the clouds.

You might think of the trend as creating retail Wonderlands, where consumers are removed from the everyday and immersed in a total brand experience.

According to J. Walter Thompson, more than seven in 10 shoppers like it when brands, products or entertainment producers actively attempt to capture their imagination — something savvy companies are expected to do in 2014.

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